Vagina (22 page)

This epidemic of vaginal and uterine injury, and the invalidism it led to, was the background against which the great Victorian women novelists and poets—from the Brontës, to George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—fantasized about women’s physical and emotional freedom.

THE STATE VS. THE “BAD” VAGINA

In 1857, the first Contagious Diseases Act was passed in England, and it was expanded in 1864. This gave the state the power to round up any woman suspected of being a prostitute, and to forcibly incarcerate her in an institution in which she was compelled to submit to a vaginal and pelvic exam against her will—ostensibly to prevent the spread of syphilis, gonorrhea, and other venereal diseases.

The legacies of the Contagious Diseases Acts are much more influential in women’s collective consciousness than histories usually suggest. All over England, especially in garrison towns, women who looked as if they might be prostitutes—a job category so loosely defined in the Victorian period that it described almost any woman who took care with her appearance, or looked or behaved as if she could be sexually active outside of marriage—could be seized by male agents acting undercover. Effectively kidnapped, they could then be held without due process in institutions much like prisons, called “lock hospitals.” There, they were restrained and forcibly medically examined—by male strangers. They were then medically treated against their will. These women could be held—legally—for up to eight months and kept away from families and employment.
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The British government planned to expand this program of the arrest and detention of young women who looked as if they might have ever been sexually active. It was to expand city by city and reach London. As British historian A. N. Wilson points out in
The Victorians,
the immense scale of these kidnappings and the scope of the terror among women that they engendered is reflected in the fact that the medical officer tasked with expanding the program to London argued against it, because, to be proportionate with the number of arrests taking place in the rest of the country, there would have to have been twelve full-scale hospitals opened in the capital just to house the women who would have to be swept up and imprisoned.
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The terror of this situation, I believe, has deeply imprinted Anglo-American female consciousness, even though few of us actually know this history.

Why do we today in the Anglo-American West so often feel that if we report a rape or sex crime against us, our treatment will depend on whether or not we ever had any sexual agency in our pasts? That if we were to “admit” sexual agency at all in our pasts, in the context of a rape inquiry, some terrible, lasting public shaming will follow? Why do investigations of sex crimes themselves, and even prosecutions and convictions, so often mirror this situation, with conviction rates higher the more “pure” or “innocent” of sexual agency a woman can be proved to have been—in contexts quite separate from the rape itself? Why do we still feel somehow that to be open about our sexual wishes or agency is somehow to court catastrophe?

Josephine Butler, an early feminist, campaigned successfully against the Contagious Diseases Acts by casting the women imprisoned in a “seduction and betrayal” narrative—they were not sexual beings but abused innocents.

Given this imprinting cultural experience of a first major feminist political victory, it is not surprising that feminism, and women’s campaigns in general, so often reflexively put their claims in a frame of women as “abused innocents,” especially when it comes to sexual issues. Our history had no room for a more nuanced frame. This success became double-edged. Feminists learned that they gained social sympathy, status, and legal victories by constructing a narrative of helpless female sexual victimization by predatory, brutal men; I call this the “wrongs of” narrative. While there were many situations that certainly suited that narrative, the problem for us is that they almost entirely failed to develop a companion discourse that included female sexual desire and sexual agency.

We still live with the fallout from this intellectual history. When I sought in 2011 to tease out, in the rape accusations against Julian Assange, what happened after the woman’s sexual consent on one level as well as her alleged lack of consent on another, I was attacked by feminists as “betraying the sisterhood.” The trouble is that most date rapes today happen after a nuanced encounter—in which a woman wants
this,
but emphatically does not want
that.
If we are unable ever to talk about sexual agency without fearing that this makes us “fair game” for anything that follows, we will never be able to prosecute real rapes successfully.

RESISTANCE

In spite of the brutal suppression of the vagina, uterus, and clitoris in this period, many female and male Victorians sought to create counternarratives to the toxic, medicalized vagina. Victorian women still sought out novels and art that represented the female self, female sexuality, and the vagina—however obliquely—in an appealing and positive light, and that sought to tell truths about female sexual desire and pleasure. Often these explorations and images were highly metaphorical.

In George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss,
for instance, Maggie Tulliver is depressed and isolated; but she is drawn by her suitor, Philip Wakem—secretly and against her parents’ wishes—to a part of the landscape that is called the Red Deeps. In this scenario, taking place in a vulval setting, female sexual desire is linked with female longing for learning, power, and a wider world:

In her childish days Maggie held this place, called the Red Deeps, in very great awe, . . . visions of robbers and fierce animals haunting every hollow. But now it had the charm for her which any broken ground, any rock and ravine, have for the eyes that rest habitually on the level. . . . In June time, too, the dog-roses were in their glory, and that was an additional reason why Maggie should direct her walk to the Red Deeps, rather than to any other spot, on the first day she was free to wander at her will—a pleasure she loved so well, that sometimes, in her ardors of renunciation, she thought she ought to deny herself the frequent indulgence in it.

Eliot describes this “wandering” as intensely pleasurable, “the pleasure returning in a deeper flush.” Maggie wonders if the secrecy with which she explores the Red Deeps is a “spiritual blight”—“something she would dread to be discovered in”—the same phrase that often describes female masturbation in this period; but “[y]et the music would swell out again, like chimes borne onward in a recurrent breeze. . . .”
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Here female desire and self-knowledge are like music that “swells out”; as in so many such scenes, the female artistic or literary imagination, the sensual natural world, and an awakening vulval sensibility are all one.

Alluring holes, beautiful boxes, and valuable treasure chests appear with clearly suggestive implications throughout the classic women’s novels of the mid-nineteenth century as well. Dr. Rees, in “Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman,” explores the novel
Villette
—which tells the story of the quiet, humble governess Lucy Snowe, and how she triumphs over adversaries in a school in Belgium and finds passionate sexual and marital love at last—and looks at Charlotte Brontë’s use of such vaginal metaphors.
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Dr. John, the “wrong” love interest who beguiles Lucy before she finds her better-suited mate, gives her illicit love letters, and Lucy furtively buries the letters under a pear tree: “I cleared away the ivy, and found the hole; it was large enough to receive the jar, and I thrust it deep in.” “I was not,” writes Lucy, “only going to hide a treasure—I meant also to bury a grief.” “Lucy compulsively conceals objects in boxes, drawers and desks . . . like Poulet’s patient, she must conceal her desires.”

Lucy Snowe signals to Monsieur Paul—the “right” lover—that she is ready to begin a romantic relationship with him by handing him her precious “box,” which “lay ready in my lap”: “And taking from the open desk the little box, I put it into his hand. ‘It lay ready in my lap this morning,’ I continued; ‘and if Monsieur had been rather more patient . . . —perhaps I should say, too, if
I
had been calmer and wiser—I should have given it then.’

“He looked at the box: I saw its clear warm tint and bright azure circlet, pleased his eye. I told him to open it.”

A clearer sense of pleasure and ownership in the vagina could not be imagined, even if Victorian social convention ensures that these scenes unfold through metaphor and allegory.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—which started publishing their magazine
The Germ
in 1850—developed explicit iconographies for the vagina. This theme was vivid in the wildly popular paintings of Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti’s brother. Dante Rossetti often painted botanically incorrect, but anatomically correct, labial and vaginal pomegranates: his half-length portrait of Dante’s Beatrice shows the beauty holding up such a pomegranate—with a cut in the skin of the fruit, and labial folds open on either side of the cut—and the same labial pomegranates appeared in his woodcuts for his sister Christina Rossetti’s highly sexual epic of female temptation, “Goblin Market.”
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Just as the Pre-Raphaelites positioned themselves as social renegades and sexual dissidents, it is tempting to read their preoccupation with painting the vagina—indeed, graphically holding up and liberating the vagina from its usual repressed nineteenth-century context—as being part of their larger impulse toward social freedom and open creative expression.

In the 1860s, British women devoured genre novels called “sensation novels.” In this kind of fiction, the heroine was not passive and dutiful—as she was in classic Victorian male fiction, like Dickens’s novels—but was instead willful and determined. These novels gave readers many passages rich with sensuous description of these women’s “voluptuous” feelings. Sensation novels were seen by the culture at large as being extremely threatening to women—especially to girls and young women—because they were understood to be arousing to them sexually. “Reading novels”—especially “reading French novels,” which tended to be even more explicit about female sexuality and desire—surfaced as a metaphor for a gateway to moral perdition for women, described in terms very much like the terms used to warn young women away from masturbation. Indeed, women reading sensation novels and women’s masturbation were often cast in terms that virtually linked them together.

THE AESTHETIC VAGINA

As the 1880s and 1890s unfolded, aestheticism became an influential avant-garde movement, and aestheticist vaginas made their appearances. Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley used schematized vagina motifs as backgrounds for his lithographs for Oscar Wilde’s plays, such as his censored play about overwhelming, even murderous female sexual desire,
Salome
(1892), as well as Wilde’s folk tales. (There were even scary vagina motifs in this period as well: anonymous authors, including possibly Oscar Wilde, wrote the 1893 erotic novel
Teleny,
in which the vagina is portrayed at times as delightful, and at other times as being slimy, noxious, and monstrous.)

The 1890s, which saw massive shifts in terms of the education and social liberation of European and American women, also saw schematized vaginas, in the form of the iconic peacock feather motif and papyrus motif, which evolved into the art nouveau and art deco upside-down triangle motif. The peacock feather was represented vertically, as if an open vulva with the “heart” of the feather design the “heart” or what doctors would call “introitus” of the vulva.

The 1880s and the 1890s were a revolutionary period in Europe and America, as “aestheticism” and then “decadence,” both of which were movements that subverted or questioned social and sexual conventions, became sweeping trends. “New Woman” writers such as Kate Chopin in
The Awakening,
Olive Schreiner, and George Egerton (a woman writing under a male pseudonym) began to write about female sexual desire. The New Woman figure, which became a focus of public discussion, was seen as sexually emancipated, and thus as very sexually threatening.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the curtain of repression of female sexuality was being lifted slightly by the sexologists, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose
Psychopathia Sexualis
appeared in 1886—though Krafft-Ebing placed “excessive” female desire in the category of “nymphomania” and argued that most well-bred women’s levels of desire should be “small”; “If this were not so,” he wrote reassuringly, “the whole world would become a brothel”
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—and the more liberal Havelock Ellis, who wrote
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
in 1889.

THE FREUDIAN VAGINA

Sigmund Freud and his followers, of course, introduced a major shift in female sexuality and how the vagina was once again reunderstood. Though the Victorian conservative commentators saw the vagina as a mechanistic delivery system for reproduction, and had defined the clitoris as making women vicious and the uterus as making them crazy and unfit for higher education, Freud redefined the vagina in psychodynamic terms. In his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905), he introduced the clitoris-vagina dualism that so engaged the 1970s and still so affects us: “If we are to understand how a little girl turns into a woman, we must follow the further vicissitudes of this excitability of the clitoris,” he wrote.
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Before Freud, the clitoris and the vagina were seen, even if not always admired, as different aspects of the same sexual/reproductive system. Freud popularized the idea that there was a kind of quarrel between them in terms of female development, and that there are morally “better” and morally “worse” kinds of female orgasm. In his terms, “mature” women had vaginal rather than “immature” clitoral orgasms, a position with which his disciples would concur and extend into the mid-twentieth century—thus making many women of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations self-doubting along the way.